Nov 28 1983
From The Space Library
NASA launched at 11:00 a.m. EST the Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-9) from KSC. Columbia carried the largest space crew ever, which consisted of John W. Young, commander; Brewster Shaw, pilot; Dr. Robert Parker and Dr. Owen Garriott, mission specialists; and Dr. Byron Lichtenberg and West Germany's Dr. Ulf Merbold, payload specialists. The crew would operate in two shifts to permit 24-hour operation of experiments. The mission was originally scheduled to get under way September 30 but was delayed to October 28 to give engineers additional time to check out a communications satellite needed to relay data to Earth from Spacelab, carried on Columbia. The flight was postponed again when an examination of the booster rockets used for the Space Shuttle mission in August revealed serious erosion of the insulation lining one of the rocket nozzles. The rocket was replaced.
Columbia carried Spacelab, designed and built by ESA, which marked Europe's first major entry into a manned space program. Other firsts associated with the flight was that it carried the heaviest payload on a Shuttle, the 33,584-pound Spacelab and pallet, and that it would include more experiments and spacecraft maneuvers than did any previous flight.
Immediately after liftoff, Columbia rolled over and turned northward to put itself into an orbital path that would range from as far north as Scotland and Leningrad to as far south as Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America in order to take pictures of Europe. The orbit would also take Columbia over Moscow and many militarily sensitive areas of the Soviet Union, the first time a U.S. manned spacecraft had flown over the Soviet Union in daylight. No pictures or other sensing would be taken of the ground while Columbia passed over the Soviet Union.
The $1-billion Spacelab's 23-foot-long laboratory was sealed and pressurized so that the scientists/astronauts could work in shirtsleeves as they carried out more than 70 experiments on 38 sets of equipment. Operating Spacelab were Merbold and Lichtenberg, a new breed of astronaut-payload specialists-who were not career astronauts but scientists trained to operate the science instruments on the mission. Wired with sensors, the scientists were guinea pigs in a number of experiments designed to explore how the body adapted to space and how it performed in the absence of gravity. Blood samples were taken three times so that scientists could study how the ratio of red to white blood cells changed once the body was weightless. Several experiments were conducted to measure eye movements; in another experiment, Garriott was given mild electric shocks to see how the muscles in his body responded to a sudden jolt that was the bodily equivalent of a sudden movement in weightlessness (doctors believed that one of the causes of space sickness might be abrupt movements that disoriented the inner ear). In another experiment, the crew in shifts pushed two balls identical in shape and size, although of different weights, to determine how quickly humans would distinguish weight from size in weightlessness.
Other Spacelab studies were concerned with the growth in space of sunflower seedlings, a fungus, and four types of microbes. Exotic metal mixes were melted, and crystals were grown in three Spacelab furnaces. There were experiments intended to determine the practicality of orbiting factories to pro-duce products not possible in the gravity of Earth.
During the flight, two antennas failed on the MRS-1 that was used to relay data from Spacelab to Earth. The failure meant that Litchtenberg and Merbold had to share the voice link to Mission Control Center in Houston with the four astronauts in Columbia's cockpit, and it meant that the two scientists got their instructions from the ground via a teleprinter aboard Spacelab. Columbia landed December 8 at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. (NASA MOR M-977-09-83-01 [prelaunch], Oct 83; NASA Releases 83-163, 83-176; NASA Dly Acty Rept, Nov 29/83; W Post, Nov 22/83, A-8, Nov 28/83, A-1, Nov 29/83, A-1, Nov 30/83, A-1; USA Today, Nov 29/83, lA; W Times, Nov 22/83, C-l; B Sun, Nov 29/83, A-1)
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